On a related note, do you see any utility in keeping the spy macro? It's pretty much what you're doing. Do you use inspect for logging or as an in-repl debugging tool? Perhaps spy makes more sense in tools.trace.

TBH, I didn't know about spy. Also, my inspect macro predates clojure.tools.logging, and might even predate clojure.contrib.logging, if you can believe that.

I use inspect as a debugging tool. The main value to jamming it into clojure.core is that I can use it in any file, without having to stop and muck with the ns declaration. Therefore if I was going to use anything else, it would need to have that property.